Book Review: Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War

The English Civil Wars started in Scotland and finished in Ireland. They involved huge incursions by Welshmen, Cornishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen and even Europeans into England but they fundementally were always about the position of England in the Atlantic Archipelago. The problem of England in seventeenth century Britain (like the problem of Germany in nineteenth Century Europe) was central to the civil war. Religion and other issues (as we shall see) drove the war- but what Mark Stoyle impressively argues here was that the English Civil War was a war in which the other nationalities of the British Isles fought to maintain their ways of life and traditional independence against an English chauvinist imperialism represented by Parliament and particularly by the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax. Stoyle's approach is so unique and interesting because he has taken on a strand of the recent historiography, that under the guidance of two of the master spirits of that discussion- John Pocock and John Morrill, has begun to represent the war in its three kingdoms context, and he has extended it. Stoyle uses the approach of concentrating on ethnicity and nationality to explain fundemental moments within the civil war in England as well as in the wider Britain.

Since the revisionist challenge of the 1970s, most historians accept that the main issue confronting us has been explaining where the royal army came from. Parliament raised its forces from London and the South East. One answer to the problem of where the royal army came from is to focus, as Stoyle has done, upon what threat that South Eastern force posed to the rest of the British Isles. The King and his propagandists skilfully allied themselves with the Celtic fringe (and the Northern counties fearfull of Parliament's religious allies the Scots)- the King's armies therefore came from Cornwall and Wales. Armies such as Sir Ralph Hopton's in the South West embarrassed Parliamentary forces in the early 40s- leading to the Royalists seizing Bristol for example. Welsh units crossed the border to support the King's forces- so much so that Stoyle argues the royalist defeat at Naseby was as much a Welsh defeat as a royalist defeat. The King's main strength in his second main army (the Western army commanded by Prince Maurice and then by Lord Goring) was either Welsh and Cornish foot or recruited mercenaries from the continent. These men joined up because Charles promised that Wales and Cornwall would maintain their rights and freedoms- because ultimately Parliament was an English institution whereas the monarchy was a British institution.

Stoyle's account is much more subtle than that- he shows how the King directly attempted to appeal to his Celtic subjects whereas Parliamentary propaganda concentrated on diminishing them and disparaging them. The one exception was of course the Scots- tempted to fight with Parliament because of a common allegiance to a radical Protestant religious settlement. However as the war continued, Stoyle also shows that this nationalistic commitment to royalism brought problems as well as manpower. This was evident from the first days of the war when Cornish soldiers refused to march across the Tamar- and it continued right up until the end of the war in 1646 when Welsh troops defected continually from the King's English army in order to defend their homeland. Parliament found it easy to buy off the Celtic forces through promising to appease their concerns in Wales or Cornwall- easy because ultimately their priority was not a King on the throne of England but the independence of their own national community. Stoyle's account presents us thus with a new account of how the royalist armies were created and a new account of how they disappeared- how Charles in the aftermath of one battle (Naseby) went from controlling half the country to controlling almost none of the country.

Stoyle's narrative is more complex and detailed than a brief review can cover- but I hope that sums up the majority of his argument. Stoyle's argument stops with the end of war in 1647- it stops there because Stoyle's argument fails to explain what happens later. Afterall if negotiated settlement worked in Wales and Cornwall, why did not Parliamentarian generals try it in Ireland- they had equated the Irish to the Cornish and the Welsh, what ended up being so different? That question reveals that nationalism is only part of the answer- religion ended up feeding into the way that Parliament felt about the nationalities that it imposed settlements upon. Stoyle never sets out to deal with the religious angle because he abandons his account as soon as Parliament starts governing, and therefore distinguishing between the Celtic fringes. This halt suggests that a true account of civil war nationalism and ethnicity ultimately has to fuse itself with an account of civil war religion: if Stoyle points out rightly that we have ignored nationalism to concentrate on religion, it is important that historians do not swing the other way and make the opposite mistake.

Lastly it is worth noting that Stoyle provides a further interesting dimension to the civil war when he discusses the 'outlanders'- those who came from Europe to the British Isles as mercenaries, as ideologically connected zealots or as liege subjects and relatives of participants. Characters like Princes Rupert and Maurice on the Royalist side and Isaac Dorislaus on the Parliamentary are interesting in themselves. Stoyle demonstrates an intriguing political subtext where the foreigners were blamed for the violence of the civil war- hated for the invention of plunder (which Englishmen assured themselves was a German word) and loathed for not being loyal enough. He sees the reason for the creation of the New Model Army in 1645 as lying in part in the attempt by Parliamentary independents to distance themselves from foreign mercenaries- who in their view were untrustworthy. It gives a new light on Cromwell's lauding of 'russet coated captains' when one realises that the opposite was a proffessional soldier from the thirty years war who fought for money and not for beliefs. Having said all that, I would like to have heard more from Stoyle about the re-immigrants, men like Hugh Peters who returned from America to fight in the English civil war, I suspect there is another article to be written about those men.

Stoyle's book is an important and interesting contribution to the topics he writes about- it is a partial view of the war but it is a corrective and one of the perils of being a historian is realising that ultimately all views are partial. Stoyle has introduced to us something that we should have realised- as I read his book, I sat rebuking myself for not noticing how many times Parliament declared that it fought for English liberties. One of the greatest honours in any academic discipline is to receive that accolade that you have started a debate- Mark Stoyle should receive that accolade.

Katyn

On 3 April 1940 around 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and professionals were taken to a forest near Smolensk. They were all shot by NKVD agents for the Russian state and their bodies left in a mass grave. The incident at Katyn Forest has become one of the iconographic moments of the second world war, defining the pure evil of the Stalinist Russian state and for many in Poland providing yet another reason, even to this day, to fear Russian intervention in their country. Katyn was denied for years by the Russian state who only admitted what they had done in 1990- even today it is not classified in Russia as an act of genocide nor have the victims been officially rehabilitated within Russia. Katyn in a sense is a symbol, both of the crimes of the Stalinist state during the second world war to other peoples- particularly Eastern Europeans, and of the violence and aggression that Russia participated in as an equal partner with Germany from the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty until the outbreak of war in 1941. Making a film about this moment in history is a brave enterprise- the problem is that the atrocity overshadows almost everything else that you could surround it with.

So how do Andrzej Wajda and his cast do? The answer is mixed. There were times in this film when I thought I was watching a television piece rather than a film- there is something uncinematic about the way that the film is shot which did not convince me. The film mostly concerns itself with the women who were left behind when their menfolk were shot at Katyn- their stories are interesting but are obscured by the central fact of the massacre. In a sense the horror of the massacre drives the story forwrads but also inhibits it. Furthermore with many of the women short scenes with few lines of dialogue mean that they merge into one greiving whole rather than becoming real individuals. The director could have focussed on one character's response and grief but instead chose to encapsulate all types of grief- the defiant, mournful and forgetful and the responses of the next generation- his frequent change of focus leaves you wondering where some characters have gone and makes it hard to relate to others. For example at one point we see a woman berate a Pole who has joined the Russian army after the war- this is when discussion of Katyn is forbidden- for betraying his comrades- we know what happens to him, but we never find out what happens to her. We also see her earlier being intimidated by the Nazi state but we never find out whether she gave in- something that is important to the later scene (how complicit is she in giving in to the temptations of accord with totalitarian powers). Stories are left hanging and one never really identifies with the characters- they appear and disappear- often going through great terrors (how did a Polish woman cross the frontier between Germany and Russia in late 1940 early 1941 without coming to any harm for example) without any explanation.

I sense and this is another major flaw of the film, that this is because Wajda has deliberately set out to make a nationalistic Polish film. He dedicated the film to the Polish Prime Minister for example and the film is filled with discussions of what it is to be Polish and what isn't Polish behaviour. Of course this misses out the fact that Poles were complicit in the oppression of the Nazi and Soviet period- the Polish treatment of Jews during the Holocaust is not a happy episode in that nation's history. Nor was the officer corps entirely beneficent itself- whilst nothing on the scale of its neighbours to the West and East, the Polish government was unpleasant, for instance in the 1930s Jews in Poland were forbidden from receiving welfare benefits and had to sit on special ghetto benches at universities. Russian and German crimes- at Katyn and elsewhere- cannot allow anyone to whitewash the Polish prewar regime. A nationalistic Polish film creates a simple opposition between resistance and compliance- between principle and opportunism- whereas actually Polish attitudes to the Nazis and Soviets were more complex. The Katyn Forest incident was a shocking demonstration of the Soviet disregard for human rights and disarms a certain simplistic understanding of Russian history (promoted by President Putin amongst others) but it must not be fitted into a simplistic portrait of Polish history either.

There are things I liked about this film though- and perhaps it is only because it takes on such an important subject that I hold it to these high standards. I think that the decision to concentrate on the women waiting at home and the people after the war is a very interesting one- perhaps it would have been better to focus either on the women in 1941-5 or the people afterwards but not on both. Its interesting because it shows you how much it is the reverberations of something like Katyn that matter and not simply the incident itself. The Holocaust still affects the grandchildren of those who were killed, the First World War's shadow hangs over 21st Century Britain and the shadow of Katyn hangs over post war Poland, particularly over the Poland that emerged into the Cold War. I liked all of that- but I still felt it was disjointed, still felt getting more intimately engaged with the characters and being less self consciously national about the portrait might have presented a more compelling argument and more interesting film. I should note that others do disagree with me- this for example is a very good and positive review- but I ultimately found something missing in this movie for me.

I would still recomend seeing it for the closing scenes and for a sense of Polish history (an important history that is not as known in the West as it should be)- this may not be the perfect film but it is about a subject that everyone should know about.

Thomas and Felix Platter

Thomas Platter was a Swiss peasant boy who learnt how to read and write, became wealthy comparatively, a printer and a teacher in later life. Felix was his son, a doctor in Switzerland as well. What is interesting about both of them is that they left memoirs of their lives- memoirs that have become as vital for the history of early modern Switzerland as the Paston letters are for medieval England. They give a vital and important portrait of the way that the Swiss lived from the early 16th to early 17th Century. But for one moment I think we should halt. Here we have the lives of a son and a father- the latter self made, the former taught and brought up by tutors, a citizen of one of the great cities of Reformation Europe. Amongst the vivid impressions that you can garner from Emannuel Le Roy Ladourie's encounter with the two memoirs is the two different personalities- the encounter is an interesting one and demonstrates the change between generations that a change in fortunes can evoke. To some extent the father's success is demonstrated by the fact that the son cannot understand his legacy.

The first difference between them is in the nature of their memoirs. Thomas's memoir is matter of fact- a catalogue of facts. Felix's more ornate with classical tags and quotations. Thomas was a more religious man flirting with the radical protestantism of the 1520s, Felix was conventionally religious. For Thomas the ladder to success was represented by writing and reading- for Felix writing and reading were things that he learnt quickly, music was where his true love lay and that love was shaped not as Thomas's by need but by a love of the texture of story and song itself. Not all of this is explained by the differences in background- it might well be differences in character as well- differences in the complex ways that humans orientate their lives. Others though are differences created by the different generations. Thomas was a teacher and had sought to be a doctor: his son was able to exercise that option and become a medic. Thomas was comfortable returning to and living in the mountains that he had come from, Felix hated them and was addicted to smooth fashions and a smoother lifestyle.

There may not be anything in these contrasts- but I think they are important and potentially interesting. We remember that these gulfs exist in the modern era- between parents and children who have lived in different worlds as social mobility propells people upwards and downwards- but the truth is that they existed in the medieval world too. One of the segmentations that is easy to forget is the segmentation between the generations in interest and condition of life- it is something that you can see in the distinction between Felix and Thomas. Ultimately Felix's context was completely different from his father's, his outlook was too- the enduring effect of social mobility or even the narrowing or widening of social divisions is the way that people understand and look to their lives, what they like and what they believe is possible to do.